To be or not to be a silly, whacked-out Bard – that is the question.
For City Repertory Theatre, the answer to whether ’tis nobler to shake up Shakespeare is a resounding, unequivocal “Shit yeah!”
The evidence can be seen – and heard – in the City Rep production of “RockabillieWillie,” which opens Friday May 2 and runs through May 11 at CRT’s black box theater in Palm Coast’s City Marketplace.
The show – one can’t rightfully call it a revue and certainly not a traditional play – is a mash-up of scenes from Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Henry V,” plus juxtaposed quotes and quips from 22 more of the Bard’s plays and a few of his sonnets.
Wait, there’s more chicanery: “RockabillieWillie” also includes live performances of old-school rockabilly, R&B, doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll hits such as Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy,” the Monotones’s “Book of Love” and more.
City Rep director and co-founder John Sbordone, who concocted the original version of “RockabillieWillie” way back in 1987 when he was doing theater in New England, notes a typical segment: “We’ve written a sequence called Midsummer Vaudeville, in which (cast members) Beau Wade and Ethan Fink go at each other and wind up doing a rap with the final words from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ but it goes back and forth and includes ‘Star Trek,’ it includes ‘Hamlet,’ it includes the Scottish play.”
(Theater aficionados will note that Sbordone’s use of the term “the Scottish play” adheres to tradition that proclaims ’tis bad luck for thespians to utter the actual title of “Macbeth.”)
The show opens with cast member and singer-guitarist Denise Quintana noting just how much fodder is in Shakes’s oeuvre that Sbordone and company can choose from: “Eight hundred and eighty-four thousand, six hundred and forty-seven words to be exact,” she proclaims, with the rest of the nine-member cast responding in unison: “No!”
“A hundred and eighteen thousand, four hundred and some-odd lines,” Quintana says. “You’re kidding me!” the cast replies.
“Thirty-one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine speeches, two-thirds of which are in verse,” Quintana says. “Shit!” the stunned cast replies.
“Fie, amid those furled worrisome brows, Willie has it covered,” Quintana says before leaping into song, including her guitar-propelled rendition of “Willie and the Hand Jive.” And so this oddball tribute to the greatest playwright of the English-speaking world is off and running.
But there’s a method to the helter-skelter madness of Sbordone and company.
“Rather than having a plot or storyline, the show is thematic,” says Sbordone, who notes “RockabillieWillie” was first staged in 1988 at the New England Drama Festival.
During his time in the Northeast, Sbordone directed “acting companies that worked together all year, and we would work on all kinds of experimental interactions and ensemble actions, so I was always looking for material for them,” he says. “I did this show called ‘Inferno: A Long Way From Dante,’ and then ‘The Joan Variations on the Arc.’ I would take index cards with various quotes on them, throw them in the middle of the floor and then start improvising and putting things together. So that’s how this originated.”
Working with such a standing ensemble would breed “trust” among the company, Sbordone says – a trust in the theatrical skills and instincts of each other – and “the more trust you have in the people you work with, the easier it is to work and the more chances you’ll take, and more risks produce the most interesting results.”
CRT presented workshop productions of “RockabillieWillie” in 2011 and 2019, partly as a vehicle for young actors to hone their skills.
“RockabillieWillie” includes “set pieces on kissing, women, love” and more, Sbordone says. The “Kissing” segment, for example, opens with Quintana performing the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” made into a hit in 1951 by the Weavers (featuring Pete Seeger), and again in 1957 by pop singer Jimmie Rodgers.
Then, Sbordone adds, “We throw a speech or quote from one play against a speech or quote from another that may connect, or we’re making it connect” – all this in the Bard’s original Elizabethan English.
“So, it’s Shakespeare’s language but it’s not his intent,” Sbordone says.
“It’s very fun,” says cast member and City Rep veteran Trey King. “It’s very much so hot potato with passing the energy, the lines. With the kissing scene, we’ll have a couple over here and one person will leave and join this couple over there, and they’ll have a completely different energy in addressing the scene.”
The show has “a lot of vocal variety,” King adds. “I think John has done a phenomenal job with walking the audience into understanding what we’re saying and why we’re saying it.”
And what of thy learned Shakespeare cognoscenti who doth believe it is blasphemy of the lowest order to commit tomfoolery upon the Bard’s noble words? That is, what about the Shakespeare snobs who blanch and blush when someone monkeys with his verse?
“I think that worldview is mainly held by audience members,” says cast member Ella Ziel. “I’ve never known any Shakespeare practitioner or actor or director who overly values the sanctity of the original script. All the Shakespeare people I know are interested in modernizing it and reimagining it and working with it for current audiences and current cultures. This feels much more like Shakespeare for non-Shakespeare people. Anyone can enjoy it.”
Sbordone notes that Britian’s Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre “have been in business for 60 or 70 years now, and there are 37 Shakespeare plays – that’s it. They’ve done them over and over, and they’ve come back at them and worked them in many different ways.”
“One of the beautiful things about doing classic theater is the titles are really well-known, and sometimes the most interesting and experimental theater in America is actually the restaging of classic plays,” Ziel says. “Companies can do something really, really weird with ‘Hamlet,’ but since people know ‘Hamlet’ they’re going to come see it anyways. In a weird way, even though you’re working with a really old script, you actually have the most creative freedom of any production.”
“Our staple audience is fairly large now,” Sbordone says. “They’ll come to see anything that we put on and trust us that it’ll be interesting.”
The cast of “Rockabillie Willie” also includes Phillipa Rose, Jen Chidekel, Lillee Raymond and Bruce Popielarski.
–Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive
City Repertory Theatre will stage “RockabillieWillie” at 7:30 p.m. May 2-3 and May 9-10, and at 3 p.m. May 4 and 11. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $25 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.
